Your First Assignment: The Summer Common Reading
As a community of scholars, we value reading as one pathway and communication as another. The Summer Common Reading is our first opportunity to do both.
All first-year students will read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric prior to arriving on campus so that students, faculty, and staff can talk together about the book during your first year at Knox. In particular, you will be discussing the book in your First-Year Preceptorial (FP). You can expect instructions about how to access your digital copy of Citizen to arrive from Dean Fatkin soon!
Citizen, originally published in 2014 and still vitally relevant in 2021, is a poetic reflection on the experience of racial difference in America, especially how race shapes private and public interactions and how Americans view their bodies and those of others. Please note that the experience of reading the book can be intense and that it contains examples of racial slurs. Citizen is a multimedia work in that it includes numerous reproductions of works of art to illustrate the text and because a section of the book is made up of scripts for a video art series called Situations.
Your first assignment as a Knox student is to read Citizen. Your second assignment will be to craft a short response to it. You will receive a message later in the summer from your academic advisor with instructions for what that response should look like and how and when to submit it. In the meantime, if you have questions about the reading, please contact Danielle Steen Fatkin, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at dfatkin@knox.edu.
|